For professionals who look to back-up their data routinely but are tired of dealing with the hassles of external hard drives and their vulnerability to failures, there’s finally some good news! Sony and Panasonic today announced that they have jointly formulated ‘Archival Disc’, a new standard for professional use, next-generation optical discs, with the objective of expanding the market for long-term digital data storage. The two technology giants have earlier worked together to develop the Blu-ray disc standard, and enter into partnership for the Archival Disc back in July last year.

Optical discs have excellent properties to protect themselves against the environment, such as dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored. Sony also claims that it will also allow inter-generational compatibility between different formats, ensuring that data can continue to be read even as formats evolve. Archival Disc is aimed at professional use initially and the plan is to offer a 300GB disc by the summer of 2015. But the two companies have given a road-map of their future plans to expand the recording capacity per disc to 500 GB and 1 TB.